Foster

by Claire Keegan

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone.

It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes shorter steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

!!!

‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’ ‘What?’ ‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

slurping a little, now that we know each other.

i love when she writes like this, little details you wouldn't normally think to add

‘Daddy,’ I warn him, I call him. ‘Daddy.’

sobbing in a cafe